There was a time when the act of “dialing” a telephone number actually involved causing a dial to rotate around a central pivot point. At the time, it was typically only required, at least in North America, to dial a seven-digit telephone number to specify the terminal to which one wished to be connected. To place a call to a terminal outside of a geographical area defined as one's local calling area, i.e., to place a “long distance” call, the digit “1” and a three digit area code was required to precede the seven-digit telephone number.
Today, due to the proliferation of mobile telephone networks and facsimile machines, telephone service providers in many North American metropolitan areas have been required to add an additional, overlapping three digit area code to many geographic areas already defined by an area code. As such, even for local calls, a full ten-digit telephone number is required to specify a particular terminal.
Furthermore, rather than being “dumb” terminals, many telephones today have significant processing power and memory built-in. Cordless telephone handsets that are particularly well suited to home use are known to store calling line identification information (i.e., caller ID) as well as a short list of frequently called numbers. Many mobile (cellular) telephones have memory to store large numbers of telephone numbers in conjunction with information such as contact name and type of telephone number (e.g., business, facsimile, mobile, home, etc.). Contact management software, in use on many desktop and notebook computers, is known to be capable of storing a significant amount of information associated with each contact name. Portable Digital Assistants (PDAs) and handheld computers have been developed along with mechanisms for synchronizing a contact database managed by a contact management application on a full-size computer with a contact database managed by contact management application on a PDA or a handheld computer. Additionally, the PDAs and handheld computers are, increasingly, being provided with mobile telephone capabilities. When such mobile telephone capabilities are combined with the information readily available in the extensive contact management databases also available on such devices, the act of placing a call can be seen to have come a long way from causing a dial to rotate around a central pivot point.
However, the complexity of placing a call to a contact with such available technology, even where the contact is called on a frequent basis, can make one remember fondly the simplicity of the dial. For instance, using the operating system of a popular PDA with mobile telephone capabilities to place a call to a contact may involve first initializing a phone application, selecting a favorites button, selecting a particular database entry associated with the contact, selecting a particular telephone number from the database entry and initializing the call to the particular telephone number. In the operating system of another popular device, after initializing a phone application, a user may cause a menu to appear, select “dial from address book” from the menu, select a database entry for a contact from the contact management database, select a particular telephone number in the database entry and initialize the call to the particular telephone number.
Clearly the act of initializing a telephone call on a device with an advanced contact management database would benefit from simplification. In addition, rather than a telephone call, an alternate manner of communication may be desired.